Agile Team Rooms can help double the productivity of an Agile Team. Most people are familiar with the Caves and Commons approach where the team has a common area on the inside of the room and private desks on the outside. Some teams dispense with the private spaces in the room, but few go as far as Menlo dispensing with the rooms altogether.
Open office layout is usually considered the default layout for Agile teams. Cubicle farms are boring and a thing of the past. Open office is known to improve communication, collaboration and build stronger teams. Is it all as good as it sounds?
The 2010 US Scrum Gathering kicked off Monday in Orlando with a buzzworthy day of "deep dive" learning, collaboration, and healthy debate.
Many of us, who are new to Agile, would believe that putting an Agile team together in a room gets the job done. A few of us would actually pay attention to what makes a room a team room which can enhance productivity and motivation. Many Agile teams have already shared their perspective on what would make an ideal team room. Here are a few recent ones.
Feature teams, common enough in small groups, are all too rare in large product development - but they can be a key to scaling with agility. This article analyses how feature teams resolve weaknesses of component teams, and points out key issues to address when transitioning. It is an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, to be published later this year.
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm demands new skills of team members – including the people skills for which they may once have depended upon their Project Managers. Far from being redundant, management can now play an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills and suggests some resources.
With an increasingly global workforce, face-to-face meetings are becoming rarer these days. In their place, we more frequently conduct business with a very different experience using a teleconference line supported by desktop sharing tools. Tips and tricks effectively facilitating these interactions, an emerging and important skill, are covered in this article.
In this interview made by InfoQ's Greg Young, Steven "Doc" List talks about Open Space conferences, a way of running meetings of groups of various sizes by facilitating self organizing the sessions.
In this short InfoQ interview, Nils Haugen spoke with Floyd Marinescu about the "Planning Poker" technique he relies on to improve team estimates. Having consciously experimented with it for a while, he described this simple practice and why it works: by making space for team members to each contribute their own perspective. In this way, it's good for estimates and for teambuilding.
For those getting started with Agile, this book offers a detailed first-person account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a distributed team of 40 people, and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.
